Strive for College matches mentors with bubble kids and helps them make positive high school choices and the best possible post secondary choice. I'm a director and believe kids need more support than most get. Here's advice from Executive Director Michael Carter.

The college application process, like navigating the job search process for the first time, is not rocket science. However, both are often confusing, counterintuitive and very time-consuming. Most importantly, both are subjective - there is no such thing as the best college, despite what the US News and World Report would like you to believe. When a high schooler asks the question "What is the best job?", the response is always another question: "Well, what do you want to do?". Traditional education is not designed to support dialog; individualized instruction has been impossible due to the prohibitive cost. Technology makes individualized education possible and it can be less expensive than traditional education. Outcomes are better because quality is higher and students enjoy the content more and the curriculum moves as fast or slow as the student needs. Technology itself though, isn't the best approach - rather the blending of technology into a classroom with an educator to help maintain focus and answer questions the computer can't yields the highest possible outcomes. Job and college search aren't the same as Algebra or American History, though. How does a computer program understand the student's response to a subjective question? What about the students who aren't motivated enough about college in the first place to use a program that helps them identify the best college for them? The answer, again, is a blended solution: technology combined with the dialog offered by personal mentors. This is exactly the approach that Strive for College is taking to close the college access gap for low-income and minority students. Strive is building a movement of undergraduates to mentor low-income students one-on-one through the process of selecting and applying to college. As college students have recently completed the process successfully and are within a few years of age of the students with which they are working, they are uniquely qualified to provide both the critical information and motivation that many low-income students lack. Strive combines the mentoring with a technology system that helps students identify the colleges that are a best-fit for them given their personal preferences and academic profile. The magnitude of the college access gap requires targeted intervention for students in nearly every community in America. Strive for College's 'high-tech/high-touch' approach has proven incredibly effective and scalable over the past few years in several locations. As we scale nationally, Strive will enable hundreds of thousands of talented low-income students to reach college, achieve their dreams, and help the American economy get back on track.

In December of 2006, The New Commission on the Skills of the American Work Force issued a challenge to the United States educational system in their publication Tough Choices or Tough Times (TCTT). Among other things, this report calls for a radical change in our educational system in order to prepare our citizens to compete in the global economy. The report is clear in outlining the qualities that will be needed to succeed in the workforce of the future. Foremost, the report cites the abilities to be creative and innovative. Because creative, “out of the box” solutions come from synthesizing and combining disparate ideas, creative teams will be necessary in every field in the workplace of the future. These teams will need to assemble, disassemble and reassemble in a short period of time, requiring each person to be adaptable, cooperative and innovative. The TCTT Report describes the work place of the future as one where workers will be “constantly organizing and reorganizing in a never-ending array of teams, like a turning kaleidoscope, some of whose members are regular employees of the firm and many who are brought in from the four corners of the world for particular projects.”

What role should schools play in nurturing these team-oriented qualities in their students? A good team member as one who deliberately volunteers his strengths to the team most of the time. It follows that students must leave school with a self-assured understanding of their strengths and how they can bring these strengths to work in their professional and personal lives. People who experience repeated success will be the ones who know their strengths and creatively bring those strengths to the teams they join.

The best way to guide students toward finding meaningful work is to develop their strengths and to help them understand how they learn. If schools expect to develop innovative thinkers who can consistently perform in a highly fluid, furiously paced future, then it is imperative that they focus on helping students identify, and practice their areas of strength before they join the workforce.

Tough Choices or Tough Times reports, “Those who are comfortable working in artistic, investigative, highly social, or entrepreneurial environments are more likely to succeed….Schools will have to learn how to simulate these environments in many ways if our students are able to develop the abilities that will be so important to them.”

Increasingly, success in the workplace depends on performance criteria that are more mental and less physical than they used to be. For example, a journalist may be required to come up with ten new ideas for stories, software developers need to arrive at four new concepts for developing interfaces, teams are charged with creating plans to troubleshoot problems. This shift applies across the board in businesses. In the past, an auto mechanic could learn the job by observing the behavior of other people at work. Today, cars run on computers and learning through observation is not as useful as technical training. In an age when most jobs require intuitive decision-making, where more mental activities replace physical ones, traditional instruction and assessment is ineffective (i.e. the teacher demonstrates how to do something and the student who repeats the performance best receives a high grade).

In the 21st century workplace, a new premium is placed on creative problem solving, teamwork and collaboration. Our schools will “bridge” students into the workforce when they begin to focus on developing student strengths and teach students how to bring those strengths to the teams they work on.

College campuses across the country are realizing that the “traditional” student is no longer the norm. More students are enrolling in postsecondary institutions who are low-income, older, working full- or part-time, have children, or have disabilities. Institutions must respond to the needs of these students to transition in, persist to degree completion, and transition out to successful career placement. One-shot, short-term bridge programs that function only as an orientation or send-off will not be enough.

Researchers focused on postsecondary enrollment and degree attainment trends for adult, non-traditional students are mining new datasets and analyses to expose some of the key decision points and gaps in support services. Recently researchers made visible the staggering numbers of students who enrolled in postsecondary institutions but failed to return for a second year. In a report entitled Finishing the First Lap, Mark Schneider, vice president, American Institutes for Research, reported that across the nation, 30% of first-year, full-time students who begin college do not return for the second year. Only 60% of college students complete a degree within six years. An accompanying website allows users to compare postsecondary institutions’ performance data and the ratio of student loan payments to earnings for recent graduates.

Low-income students are enrolling in postsecondary institutions in higher numbers, fueled in part by improved high school completion rates. However, the rate of degree completion has remained stagnant as shown in a series of reports called Portraits by the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Even more disturbing, among the low-income students who do graduate with a postsecondary degree, 10% are unable to leverage their education to escape poverty.

The GED credential represents a second chance at high school completion for the millions of American adults who did not graduate. But until this year, little was understood about how well the GED on-ramp to postsecondary education was working. A longitudinal study reported by the GED Testing Service, Crossing the Bridge, followed the 2003 GED test-passer cohort of 540,031 adults. Of this group, 42.9% did enroll in postsecondary institutions within three years of receiving the credential. However, the rate of degree completion was disappointingly low at 11%. In fact, the rate of drop out before the second semester – an even earlier timeframe than the First Lap analysis – was a disturbingly high one third.

Bridge programs can be effective but will not solve problems for students who are seriously behind in the kinds of literacy and critical thinking skills that most entry level college courses require. These programs may be more effective for the transition to community college, so long as the community colleges provide academic supports to continue to strengthen students’ skills. And those skills are both the academic skills needed for coursework and also the study skills and general organization skills and strategies needed for college work and for employment.

Shifting Gears, funded in part by the Joyce Foundation, is an initiative that aims to realign workforce development and postsecondary access through state policy changes. This work has uncovered the state and institutional policies that facilitate the seamless transitions, dual enrollments, and contextualized learning opportunities shown to successfully support low-income and underprepared students learn and earn.

In Illinois, for example, the community colleges realigned how workforce development courses counted full-time enrollments (FTEs) and compensated instructors to bring workforce programs more in line with academic tracks. The initiative allowed dual enrollment, team teaching, and certification programs that successfully prepared adults for viable careers. The bridge programs surveyed in the BridgeConnect report from the Workforce Strategy Center report echo the comprehensive nature of successful programs.

Last year, AIR sponsored an all-day policy symposium called Changing the Odds to discuss the policy implications of such research findings. The report from the symposium calls attention to the need for bold, big picture initiatives that address the real needs of low-income and non-traditional students and aim to reinvent institutions and change policies – including loan policies – so all students can succeed.

Basic skills education tends to be more effective when it's part of job training. Adults are likely to be more motivated in industry-sponspored programs linked directly to jobs than they'd be in the traditional remedial class at a community college. So let's try the bridge concept and see if it works

However, our real problem is not that older people forget academic skills when they're years out of high school. The problem is that many people never master reading, writing and 'rithmetic in the first place. A lot of 18-year-olds are on the wrong side of the academic gulch.

Maybe we need a "bridge from third to fourth grade and from fifth to six and from eighth to ninth and . . . Well, I hate to beat a good metaphor to death. We need to get serious about teaching K-12 students so they'll be able to learn as adults.

Here is a response from Susan Traiman, director of public policy at the Business Roundtable.

The future of education envisioned by the common standards movement is one where high school graduates who achieve the standards will enter college-level courses without the need for remediation. Ideally the standards will also enable young adults to enter the workforce equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in their careers.

Whether that’s a realistic future scenario or not, it currently is far from reality for teens and adults who did not get the knowledge and skills needed to succeed either in postsecondary education or the workplace. The learning gaps between school and work go beyond traditionally-defined remediation. Frequently employers report that new entrants to the workforce – even college graduates – lack the basic professional skills. That’s why Business Roundtable developed JobSTART 101: Smart Tips and Real-World Training.

JobSTART 101 is a free online course for college students that introduces the professional skills necessary for entry-level employees to succeed in the workplace and addresses the challenges and expectations they will face. While it may seem obvious that the writing style used by college students to send text and email messages is not appropriate at work, it’s not. Students need to learn how to communicate effectively and appropriately in the workplace. The course is engaging and fast-paced – can be completed in 90 minutes – and covers topics that range from managing emotions at work to solving work-related problems.

Should schools teach these professional skills? Many could be introduced in the context of the common standards and in the behavior expected from students, but let’s not pile more on a curriculum that’s already a mile wide and an inch deep.

America has bought into a bad idea. I’m talking about the “readiness” concept.

Here’s how it works: You give us your children and we’ll give them back to you “ready” to go to college or to get a job.

Seems fair. But then you start to think about it. What does “ready” really mean? How would anyone know if someone was “ready” for something until they tried that something out? And if, at that point, it turned out that they weren’t ready, wouldn’t it be too late?

Not if there are “bridge” programs, apparently.

So now, I guess, we’re going to buy into two bad ideas: the “readiness” concept and the “bridge” concept.

WHAT’S A “BRIDGE” PROGRAM?

Here’s how the report from The Workforce Strategy Center describes “bridge” programs: “Bridge programs are a 21st-century idea for helping prepare low-skilled individuals for jobs that require more education.”

No. Bridge programs are a 21st-century euphemism for boondoggles that try to make up for education systems that failed kids while they were in school. I’ve worked with the Centerpoint Institute for Life and Career Renewal for almost twenty years—which I believe puts them squarely in the 20th century.

The folks at Centerpoint don’t build bridges, they help people build better lives for themselves. And they don’t do it with some kind of “program”; they do it with a very smart model, very smart people, and a very smart set of resources that support their members in finding their way to work that works for them.

I’ve spoken many times with Carol Vecchio, Centerpoint’s founder, about how easy and appropriate it would be to put the kind of work her organization does into K-12 education.

What’s the point, we’ve both mused, in kicking kids out of school with all their standardized knowledge and skills, only to see them standing in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble reading “What Color is Your Parachute?” We don’t need “bridge” programs, we need education that actually educates people to the point where “bridging” is unnecessary.

And Job Start 101? Gimme a break. If you need Job Start 101, you need a lot more than a chance to watch the CEO of Accenture speaking really slowly in really small words for a really long time. You need actual knowledge and skills, and some serious passion for what you want to do in life—things you should easily be able to get in school, things you’re never going to get from an online “career guidance program”.

Programs like Job Start 101 are unnecessary for two reasons: they merely cover basic skills that should have been covered some place else (and can easily be covered almost any place else), and they tend to make learners more passive when they should be instilling a sense of urgency.

The mere fact of these programs’ existence means that we are failing. And the fact that we are apparently growing more of these programs suggests that we are planning to fail even more in the future.

WHY NOT JUST TRY LEARNING?

If your skills don’t measure up to what you want do with your life, skill yourself up. Do you really want a “bridge” program or do you just want a better job? Why waste time and money with a program when you could be mastering the knowledge and skills required to do what you really want to do?

Stop preparing and start living. Stop trying to get ready and just start being ready. It’s not that hard. Read a book. Surf the Net. Get on the phone. Interact with people like you and people you want to be like. It’s people, not programs that make our lives go. You want to hear about my “bridge” program? Read this paragraph again.

“Jobs programs”, “workforce training programs”, “career counseling programs”, and other varieties of “employment euphemism programs” are notoriously poor ways to develop real-world knowledge and skills. The real world itself is much more efficient and reliable.

Technology makes it pretty easy these days to fashion your own program, one that that’ll probably get you what you want in twelve weeks instead of twelve months—and not leave you with bankruptcy-inducing loans to repay when you discover that the “bridge” you bought into wasn’t built with your personal success and future prosperity in mind but was conceived as a kind generic experience in the “exploration of options” and the “pursuit of opportunity”.

Of course, rather than worrying about “bridge” programs, we could just decide to get things right the first time. But I guess that’s too much to ask of our schools, our teachers, our parents, and our kids.

So let’s just shoot for something that sounds good, like “readiness”. This way we don’t actually have to be good because nobody really knows what “readiness” is—and it can only be assessed after the fact anyway.

This is how we know we’re going to need those “bridge” programs. Because we already seem to know that kids aren’t going to be ready or that adults who want more training can’t figure out how to get it any other way.

So we’ll start by creating a culture of low expectations for kids and we’ll keep funding it right up into adulthood so older folks can experience low expectations, too.

I thought we were going to educate people for real this time. I thought that’s what this whole CCSSI thing was all about. Apparently, we’re only going to get some people “ready”—just like all the other times. But don’t worry, if you’re not ready, we’ll make “bridge” programs for you.

We can keep people sequestered from reality and in some form of educational program indefinitely. Or, we can forget about “readiness” and strive for actual knowledge and ability. Wouldn’t that be so much simpler?

THE BRIDGE AND READINESS CROWD

This “bridge” and “readiness” stuff is wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to begin. So I’ll begin with Dewey: “Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.”

The idea that education is preparatory and future-focused rather than actual and present-based exacerbates many of the problems we are trying so hard to address: weak curriculum that doesn’t match the world it purports to describe; weak teaching that doesn’t bring real world knowledge and skills to students; phony assessment that says people are “proficient” at something but can’t define what proficiency is in meaningful real-world terms; data-driven decision-making with data so bad we drive ourselves crazy making decisions with it.

“Readiness” is sort of the “light beer” of mastery, right? We advertise it, we consume it, we think cutting back on calories means cutting back on alcoholism, too. “Light Beer” is a marketing campaign for fake responsibility in beverage consumption. Ever hear of water? It’s free. It’s healthy. It seems pretty easy to get.

Learning’s not much different if you start from the idea that everyone has to learn to survive and that it’s our responsibility as a society to provide the structures and support they need to maximize their potential in a timely and efficient way.

Budweiser wants us to drink more beer, so they give us “Bud Light”. Our government and organizations like The Workforce Strategy Center and The Business Roundtable want us to consume “Education Light”. It must be more responsible than real education.

Apparently, we’ve given up on the idea of people knowing and being able to do things, so we’ll just make them ready to know and be able to do things instead. And when we don’t’ make them ready, we’ll send them to bridge programs. Where, but in education, would we settle for this?

How about the automotive industry? Wanna buy a car that GM says is “road ready”, or a car that they’ve actually tested on a real road? Don’t worry, if your car falls apart or you die driving it, we’ve got a bridge program for you.

Wanna take medication that the government has labeled “human ready”, or would you prefer something that’s actually been proven safe and effective? Don’t worry, we’ve got a bridge program that even includes free transportation to and from the ICU at your nearest hospital.

I don’t want to rob anyone of needed educational opportunity. That’s why I’d like us to focus on improving the structures we have rather than making new structures that may or not be successful because we really have no idea how they should work or how to operate them effectively.

If “bridge” programs were a proven component of our education system, I’d say let’s have more “bridge” programs. But if they were that successful, why wouldn’t they just be our education system?

My concern is that if we create new levels of ancillary support systems, our main system will do less and less each year. In a decade or two, kids will just mark time until they’re old enough to drop out, and then head for a “bridge” program.

Such programs may or may not help them because it’s so much harder to predict the help young adults will need, especially if those young adults show up with lower levels of skill, and less passion for work, each year.

If, as the Workforce Strategy Center claims, “bridge” programs are for low-skilled people, these programs must have highly-efficient ways of helping people learn. If that’s true, why don’t we use those ways in school? And if it’s not true, what justifies the creation and maintenance of low-efficiency learning environments?

It’s all just learning. And we already have a system for that called school. Granted, school isn’t great right now. But why not just make it great. Then we wouldn’t need so many other kinds of systems.

School may not be great precisely because we have so many different systems to support. Consider that even without “bridge” programs, we already have a plethora of post-secondary education options, few of which seem to be working much better than K-12.

For a single country, we’re already extraordinarily decentralized when it comes to education. We already have a thousand flowers blooming. Do we really need another new variety? What’s makes this species better than the others? For the number crunchers out there, do we propose to measure these “bridge” programs as rigorously as we measure K-12? Or are we going to go for the “I’m OK. You’re OK.” approach to measurement that we use in our colleges and universities?

WHEN IS “READY” READY?

Then there’s the problem of deciding when “ready” is ready. As Dewey noted, “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”

Oooo… “choice of action”. I really like the sound of that, don’t you? How does our forthcoming standardized education system help kids with this “choice of action” stuff? How will “bridge” programs help their participants develop a strong sense of “choice of action”?

When, exactly, are these little tasty-baked learners gonna pop out of the oven of the American education system? Oh, I’ll set my timer. Hmmm, twelfth grade. That oughta be about right. Cue “Pomp and Circumstance”. March down aisles. Turn tassles. Go forth and multiply.

Unless you can’t multiply, and then we’ll send you to a “bridge” program because they must have better ways of teaching multiplication, right? Then why aren’t we using these better ways in school? (See previous logical argument about the redundant nature of “bridge” programs.)

Will people be “ready” after they’ve crossed a “bridge”? Or will further assistance be required? After “bridge” programs, will we move to full “transportation” programs to carry people from cradle to career? Or will we start asking them to carry themselves, and give them the tools, time, and training they need to choose a meaningful destination and to get there on their own?

On one hand, we have caregiving—proper support and structure that scaffolds us when we begin and that inspires to move on as quickly as possible. On the other hand, we have caretaking, unending programmatic internment in systems that communicate to children and adults that they simply can’t do anything without somebody else’s custodial assistance.

AFTER THE READINESS, THE BRIDGING. AFTER THE BRIDGING, THEN WHAT?

Learning and life seem to me to offer continuous challenges and opportunities. To quote Dewey again: “Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.”

“Readiness” is not a goal, it’s a Madison Avenue slogan for the re-branding of standards-based ed reform in the post-NCLB era. Yes, of course, we all want our kids to be ready, and we want adults furthering their education to be ready, too. But “ready for what” is the real issue. And by “ready” in this context, don’t we really mean “willing” and “able”?

What good does it do to think of mythical endpoints in terms of “readiness” when ability and willingness are really the make or break components of present and future success? Why do we create “readiness” and “bridge” programs when what we really want are “ability” and “willingness” programs?

Because “readiness” is cheap. Nobody’s really on the hook for anything. “Bridge” programs—along with their evil twin, the oxymoronic “college-level remediation”—will make lots of money for lots of people.

For-profit groups will be thrilled to build “bridge” programs. Institutions of higher education will be just as excited to admit more unqualified kids who will have to take extra classes merely to qualify for the possibility of pursuing degrees they are unlikely to finish, or be able to pay for even if they do finish.

Financial aid will drive the expansion of classes and programs. Which means that you and me, the taxpayers, will end up paying twice to educate our kids: the first time at the state and local level where we’ll pay for “readiness”, and then once again at the federal level where we’ll pay for the “bridge” programs people need because our “readiness” programs didn’t get them ready.

READINESS OR REALITY?

In terms of what we want for people, and what we need for our country, “readiness” is irrelevant and “bridge” programs are unnecessary—if we’re doing our job, that is.

Is a kid ready for college? Well, either he gets in or he doesn’t. Either he does the work or he doesn’t. Either he graduates or he doesn’t.

Is an adult ready for a new job? Same calculus. Now, which metric works best for you? The “readiness” metric or the “been there, done that” metric? I know which one I like.

In choosing “readiness” as our goal, we have chosen yet another low and statistically malleable bar for ourselves and for our citizens. Hasn’t anyone thought about the fact that “readiness” is a moving target? And that it will be in the interests of politicians to keep it moving ever lower over time?

Relying on “bridge” programs to help adults who didn’t do well in the “readiness” lottery find their way to something new sounds warm, cozy, and compassionate. But think about the problem of prediction.

To create a successful “bridge” program, we have to build it years ahead of when it’s actually needed. Then we have to deploy it and hope that by the time people have gone through it, we’ve guessed correctly about what they need. How do we make this kind of prediction with reasonable reliability? And do we tell the people who pay for it that we’re really just guessing about whether or not participants will be “ready” when they finish?

We’ve endured all this controversy and bickering over quantifying education during the last decade. We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new tests for the coming decade. We’ve written standards now more times than we can count. And “readiness” is the best we can do?

Apparently, we know that “readiness” is not good enough because we’re already working on “bridge” programs. Why would we need “bridge” programs? Probably because we expect that a lot of people won’t be “ready”.

Why don’t we just decide that “successful” will be the new “ready”. Why don’t we hold ourselves to higher standards instead of only making learners toe the line?

Can you see how dangerous this “readiness” and “bridge” stuff is? Can you see the self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in the combination of “readiness” and “bridge” programs were they to be locked together in some kind of K-20 educational assembly line?

One part of the system could just pass people off to another part, stand on an aircraft carrier, and let a “Mission Accomplished” banner flap in the breeze. The K-12 folks need only aspire to “readiness”. And who cares if they fail? “Bridge” programs will somehow get the unready across the mythical transom to college and career.

But again—and I really do hate to keep repeating this but it’s so important—if “bridge” programs are this effective with low-skilled participants, why aren’t they just part of school to begin with? And if they’re not incredibly effective, why do we need them?

LET’S GO TO 11

I’m reminded of that iconic scene from “Spinal Tap” where sincere and sincerely confused “rockumentarian” Marty DeBergi asks lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel why his amps go to 11 instead of the usual 10. “Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it?” Tufnel remarks. “Yeah,” DeBergi says. “But why don’t you just make 10 louder, and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?”

Stunned into apoplexy, Mr. Tufnel is apparently unmoved by this commonsensical reasoning —and apparently neither are Americans. We’ll just create our own scale and make people “one smarter” through “bridge” programs. It’s brilliant.

YES, I KNOW, I’M BEING UNREASONABLE AGAIN

I know that what I’m asking for here is mastery learning. But isn’t that intuitively what most Americans expect their education system to strive for?

Who sends their kid to school with the intent to learn 57% of Algebra, 72% of Language Arts, and 63% of Science. What does “proficiency” mean when it is merely masking this kind of “fractional learning”? Who wants “bridge” programs that only build part of a bridge?

CCSSI just went through thousands of hours of work defining actual knowledge and skills. Now, will these be “real” standards, things we expect kids to know and be able to do?

Or are we going to do what we did last time and pronounce all kinds of kids “proficient” when we know that this kind of statistical judgment is at best a loose correlation between fantasy and reality, a psychometric proxy for knowledge and ability embodied in a test rather than real knowledge and ability embodied in a person?

The danger in this, of course, is the danger in thinking that our system is giving us one thing (kids who are “ready”) when it may actually be giving us something else (kids who are “ready” for a “bridge” program because they aren’t really “ready” for anything at all).

Why not exchange “readiness” for “mastery”? Are we chicken? Why build “bridge” programs? Are we unwilling to oblige ourselves to complete our deliveries?

What is “readiness” but a way of saying “We’re not sure but we think this person might be educated.” And what are “bridge” programs but a way of saying “Well, we don’t really have to get people ready for anything because we can bridge them to anything else any time we want.”

Which only begs the uncomfortable questions of why we didn’t educate them the first time around and why, if “bridge” programs are so great for low-skilled learners, we don’t just use their techniques in school to begin with.

COMMIT TO MASTERY

The way to do away with this nonsense is to commit to mastery of foundational competencies along with the inculcation of an attitude of continuous improvement.

Dewey had a point. And so do many hard-core conservatives. There’s nothing wrong with rigor.

And since the point of education now is to get a job, there’s clearly nothing wrong with relevance.

Throw in relationships and we’ll end up with a liberal program.

But guess what, folks? Most people find their way to the best work of their lives through relationships. Learning to expand them, deepen them, manage them, and use them well is probably the #1 “skill” most people need to know to succeed in virtually all aspects of life.

Now isn’t that a set of strange bedfellows?

Conservatives can have rigorous curriculum. Technocrats can have relevance so that conservative rigor can be directed toward workplace competency. And Liberals can have all the relationships they want because everybody knows that it really is who ya know that makes things go.

This actually makes sense. And it knits together very nicely three factions that, under normal circumstances, only grudgingly attend each other’s cocktail parties to see who’s got the best hors d’oeuvres.

The question is, “Do we have the stones to really take this on and do it right?” I’d like to think that we do. We certainly have all the information we need to do it.

But while we seem to have reached an uneasy consensus that education is job training, we haven’t created a K-12, post-secondary, or career training infrastructure that puts the best of what we know in place.

We sure are excited about spending money, though. To misuse an over-worked phrase from all the lawyer shows on TV, “These days, you could turn a ham sandwich into an education-related program and get funding for all the bread and mustard you could ever want.”

Why are we so enamored of systems that keep people locked into programs and locked out of the real world they’re all striving to get into?

Why cut school off from the world and hold people within it until they’re “ready”, and then when they’re not send them off to “bridge” programs?

Why not make schooling a part of the world, bring the world inside of it, send people out into it, let them learn by succeeding and failing at meaningful tasks, let them measure themselves not by tests but by experience?

As the great educator Ken Macrorie once wrote, the best schooling involves “challenging learners to connect their experiences and ideas with those of the accepted authorities or producers.”

Notice that Macrorie does not want people to be “ready” to measure themselves against the best of their society; he wants them to be doing it while they’re learning. Notice that he does not want some other set of institutions to “bridge” kids from “unreadiness” to some other place. Macrorie wants real kids to learn real things about the real world in real time. Really.

DON’T GET READY, GET REAL.

It’s time to get real, America. Get real about educating the next generation (and probably a good chunk of the current generation, too). Dump “readiness” and replace it with mastery. Blow up the bridges and make school do its job. Stop passing the buck.

Combine the attainment of high levels of knowledge and skill at every point with the notion that learning is a lifelong endeavor so we can teach kids how to live in the world of the future by showing them how to master it in the present through—dare I say it—rigorous, relevant, relationship-driven education.

As Dewey said, “Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”

Let’s not put learning off until later. We only have these people with us in our institutions for a short while. Let’s not waste time getting them “ready” when we could just get them educated.

And let’s not kid ourselves, or our country, about our responsibility. “Readiness” and “bridge” programs are just two more examples of “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.

We can do better. We can at least pledge to do better and aspire to do better. This is, after all, nothing more than we ask of our children in school and of adults trying to better themselves outside of it.

Educating a nation is hard work. It takes more than just euphemisms and programs. It takes brains, brawn, and a little bit of bravado, too, I suppose. It certainly takes more than what The Workforce Strategy Center has in mind. Take a look at the footer that runs across the bottom of every other page on their report: “Building a Higher Skilled Workforce”.

Didn’t we used to say we wanted a “highly skilled” workforce?

Maybe we do just want to make people “one smarter”. Maybe this whole thing is just a satire, with a fake band, on a fake tour, telling some really funny jokes, and doing some really funny things so Rob Reiner can make a really funny movie.

Sheesh. I hope not.

This comment comes from Julian L. Alssid, the Executive Director of the Workforce Strategy Center, whose study about the types of programs that help adults, primarily, gain the remedial skills they need to get ready for college courses or technical training is the subject of today's Education Blog question.

What our survey, the BRT program, and a number of other undertakings are showing is that education in many ways needs, and is starting to undergo, a reboot.

Let's be clear, this is not to say that education as we have understood it on the K-graduate level is bad, but rather, while society, economy, and technology have changed, fundamentally our educational system has not kept up.

What is needed is new forms of education, new methods of delivery, and new ideas that will change education as much as the web has changed how we communicate.

Take college. Until as little a 20 years ago, college could be a "right of passage," and if you missed that boat you were most likely excluded from the highest levels of the American promise. No more. Today college has to be more relevant to future careers and more accessible to everybody.

But here is the good news, as our survey and other programs show, many in business and educators have realized they need to work together to make education more relevant. Not dummed down. More relevant. And as America has done many times, we can close our education gap and build the next stage of this story of our country through what we have always done better than anybody else. Innovate.